Improving AODV performance using dynamic density driven route request forwarding

Ad-hoc routing protocols use a number of algorithms for route discovery. Some use flooding in which a route request packet (RREQ) is broadcasted from a source node to other nodes in the network. This often leads to unnecessary retransmissions, causing congestion and packet collisions in the network, a phenomenon called a broadcast storm. This paper presents a RREQ message forwarding scheme for AODV that reduces routing overheads. This has been called AODV_EXT. Its performance is compared to that of AODV, DSDV, DSR and OLSR protocols. Simulation results show that AODV_EXT achieves 3% energy efficiency, 19.5% improvement in data throughput and 69.5% reduction in the number of dropped packets for a network of 50 nodes. Greater efficiency is achieved in high density network and marginal improvement in networks with a small number of nodes.